Prices Rise, but So Do Options

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A busy crosswalk at West 95th Street and Broadway, with a subway station topped by a curved glass dome.

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By Aileen Jacobson

Dec. 24, 2014

Suzy Krahenbuhl had spent just a week in her new co-op apartment on West 94th Street, but she had already volunteered to help build a new community room in the building’s basement, a project that the residents are tackling themselves.

“I always kind of liked the neighborhoody feel of the Upper West Side,” she said. “And I loved that this building is a little community within the neighborhood.” She paid $340,000 earlier this month for her studio, she said, moving from a rental with two roommates in Alphabet City.

She had looked to the south, but the apartments were too small or too expensive. “If I wanted to go north, I could get more for my money,” she said, but that would mean a longer commute to her job as a graphic designer near Union Square, and perhaps fewer restaurants, grocery stores and other amenities nearby.

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131 WEST 95TH STREET A townhouse, at center, with five bedrooms and five and a half baths, listed at $7,995,000. (917) 509-7620CreditCassandra Giraldo for The New York Times

The West 90s, long considered a bargain compared with the areas to its south, is indeed a congenial place, where people often greet and help one another, said Aaron Biller, who has lived there for 30 years, many of them as the president of Neighborhood in the Nineties, a multiblock association. The area is undergoing changes that are making it more desirable for some new residents but also raising purchase prices and rents, he said.

“We’re starting to see a huge wave of upscale development starting in this area,” said Mr. Biller, a writer, marketing consultant and publicist. Around the corner from his apartment, he noted, a new building on West End Avenue that replaced two townhouses is offering full-floor condominiums starting at $2.6 million, and several other buildings are converting from rentals to co-ops. A former church on Central Park West and a Salvation Army residence for the elderly on West End Avenue are candidates for residential conversion but are being held up by contentious opposition — another aspect of the area’s strong community engagement.

The first wave of gentrification, Mr. Biller said, began in the 1980s, when William Zeckendorf Jr. and partners built the Columbia, a luxury condominium of more than 30 stories, with a pool and other amenities, on the corner of Broadway and 96th. It signaled “that gentrification is real,” Mr. Biller said. Another wave of new buildings arrived in the 1990s, he said, and now a third phase is underway.

Scott Stewart was a struggling actor when he moved to the neighborhood 22 years ago, he said, sharing a small apartment with three other actors on West 98th Street. “There were still a lot of drug deals going on in the streets,” he said. But that changed rapidly, he said, after Rudolph Giuliani became mayor in 1994 and increased the police presence. Mr. Stewart, who now sells real estate for the Corcoran Group, bought a two-bedroom two-bath condo in 2008 in the then-new Ariel West, a 31-story building on West 99th Street. He declined to say what he paid but said its value has risen about 20 percent.

Though many longtime residents disagree, Mr. Stewart welcomes recent commercial development, including restaurants and a Whole Foods Market along Columbus Avenue about two blocks away. “The number of dining establishments has tripled,” he said. “It’s become a much more comfortable neighborhood.”

What You’ll Find

The streets of the West 90s stretch from Central Park West on one side to Riverside Park on the other. In between are lively commercial streets like Broadway and quiet residential streets like the numbered ones near both parks.

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The West 90s occupy a quintessential Manhattan neighborhood, with Beaux-Arts architecture and two celebrated parks.CreditCreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

One architectural highlight is quaint Pomander Walk, a complex of buildings between 94th and 95th Streets west of Broadway that looks as though it belongs in an old English village. Now a co-op, it was built in 1921 to resemble the set of a Broadway play of the same name, taken from a street in the London suburb of Chiswick.

In contrast, a redesigned subway station at 96th Street, topped by a curved glass dome, that opened in 2010, looks as though a spaceship has landed on an island between the east and west sides of Broadway. Bold painted white stripes of broadened pedestrian crosswalks at the intersection indicate a recent effort to prevent accidents in the area, as do traffic islands installed earlier this year at West End Avenue and West 95th and West 97th Streets, where pedestrians had been killed.

The section of the neighborhood along Columbus Avenue from 97th to 100th streets has become more crowded in the last decade. The recent addition of a five-building luxury rental complex called Columbus Square includes a Whole Foods Market and other stores. Winifred Armstrong, a past president of the Park West Village Tenants’ Association, which represents residents of seven buildings along Columbus and Central Park West, has lived in the area since 1967 and said, “This neighborhood is much less of a community than it used to be, much less diverse than it used to be.”

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251 WEST 98TH STREET, #9C A three-bedroom two-bath condo in a prewar elevator building, listed at $1,750,000. (212) 726-0722CreditCassandra Giraldo for The New York Times

What You’ll Pay

Prices have risen significantly in the past few years, said Mr. Stewart of Corcoran. The average price of all apartments sold through mid-December was $1.47 million in 2014 (when 407 were sold), compared with $1.26 million in 2013 (for 453 apartments), a 17 percent increase, according to a Corcoran analysis. Studios rose the most, by 22 percent, to $553,992 in 2014 from $454,680. Only four-bedroom and larger apartments dropped slightly, to $3.87 million from $3.91 million. The average 2014 price for one-bedrooms was $776,913 (up 17 percent from $662,989); for two-bedrooms, $1.4 million (up 17 percent from $1.2 million); and for three-bedrooms, $2.6 million (up 11 percent from $2.35 million).

Still, Mr. Stewart said, compared with the West 70s and 80s, “in the 90s, you’ll get a better value, all things being equal, of course.”

What to Do

Symphony Space, the performing arts center at 2537 Broadway and 95th Street, is the main cultural draw, with music, comedy, film, dance, theater, family fare, literary events and a book club.

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41 WEST END AVENUE, #5A A one-bedroom one-bath co-op in an elevator building, listed at $529,000. (917) 806-4068CreditCassandra Giraldo for The New York Times

The West Side Arts Coalition’s Broadway Mall Community Center, on a center isle of Broadway at 96th Street, is a much smaller place for exhibitions and events, with limited hours.

Besides offering places to run, walk, bike or play, the two parks that flank the West 90s also have tennis courts. The Riverside Clay Tennis Association has 10 courts along the Hudson River that are open seasonally to the public, in Riverside Park near 96th Street. The Central Park Tennis Center, also seasonal, offers 26 public clay courts inside the park in the mid-90s near the West Drive.

The Schools

Among the many schools in the West 90s are Public School 075 Emily Dickinson, at 735 West End Avenue near 96th Street, serving kindergarten through Grade 5, and Middle School 250 West Side Collaborative Middle School, at the same address, for grades 6, 7 and 8. Also sharing an address, at 154 West 93rd Street, are M.S. 256 Academic and Athletic Excellence and M.S. 258 Community Action School, both for grades 6, 7 and 8, and P.S. 333 Manhattan School for Children, for kindergarten through Grade 8. Two other schools are at 32 West 92nd Street: P.S. 084 the Lillian Weber School, for prekindergarten through Grade 5, and M.S. M247 Dual Language Middle School, for grades 6 through 8. Another school, P.S. 163 Alfred E. Smith, at 163 West 97th Street, faces possible disruption this year if work begins on a proposed nursing care facility behind the school, said Rene Kathawala, the chairman of a task force that is trying to stop the construction or at least to mitigate its effects, “so the students are safe and sheltered from the noise.”

The Commute

The 1, 2 and 3 lines stop at 96th and Broadway, and B and C lines stop at 96th and Central Park West. An express ride from 96th and Broadway to 42nd Street usually takes less than 15 minutes.

The History

A bronze statue of Joan of Arc astride a horse, a sword in her right hand, guards a hilltop on a sliver of parkland at West 93rd Street and Riverside Drive. Created by Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), it was dedicated in 1915 in an elaborate ceremony with a military band.